Six Reasons Why Palworld is Primed to be the Defining Game of Our Lifetimes (or How the Idea of Palworld Completely Broke Me)
Note - This Article is Not Affiliated with Pocket Pair, Inc or Palworld in any way.
On the day I write this, we are only days away from the release of Palworld (1). The premise of Palworld is simple: Pokémon meets survival/farming game meets heavy munitions. I concede that Palworld might look like a gimmick, but I can’t help but feel that we teeter collectively on the cusp of something truly remarkable: the defining game of our lifetimes. Much in the way Francis Fukuyama boldly and erroneously proclaimed the end of history, I hereby proclaim that Palworld is the end of gaming (2). Of course new games will be made, but from January 19th, 2024, all roads lead back to Palworld.
Figure 1. A picture is worth a thousand Pals. (3)
Now I should say that I have not played Palworld, and other than some promotional material there isn’t a lot of information available about the game. In my view this is the perfect context for the hearsay and conjecture upon which I stake my completely earnest, legitimate, and coherent claim regarding Palworld’s future glory and its impact upon gaming, the games industry, all other industries, and the sum-total future of the human experience. Below I list what I view as the six most important reasons why Palworld represents the culmination of design, fandom, and culture in the digitized ludic form that we call video games.
1. Collectible Monsters
Figure 2. A couple of Pals that resemble no characters from another popular IP. (4)
People love to collect things. Stamps, buttons, baseball cards, emotional and physical scars, et cetera. It’s a wonder that no one before Pocket Pair, Inc has considered that cute monsters might appeal to consumers from all walks of life. You might be saying “but what about the Garbage Pail Kids? What about Crazy Bones? What about Pokémon, the highest grossing media franchise in terms of revenue of all time?” These are all good questions that require addressing. First, Garbage Pail Kids are from the 80s, and as we now know, nothing that happened in the 80s matters anymore. Second, Crazy Bones were never as popular as pogs which didn’t even need to rely on monstrosity to become popular, so why am I even talking about them. Third, Pokémon are popular but are they really that scary when they can’t even wield a trusty sidearm? Which brings me to my next point…
2. Guns
Given that we are living on the brink of World War III, surely dear reader, you are familiar with the military industrial complex. According to the Stockholm International Peace Institute, “the combined arms revenue of the world’s largest arms-producing and military services companies (the SIPRI Top 100) was $597 billion in 2022,” (5). That’s a lot of money that the pocket-monster-character-goods-video-game market has been leaving on the table. Hit franchises like Call of Duty (6) and Battlefield (7) understand the value of guns for producing a bonafide video game. Pikachu has become a mascot for a series that has moved millions of units and embedded itself in the hearts and minds of the young and old alike, but just imagine how many more sales the Pokemon franchise would have if Pikachu was able to open carry a Howitzer.
Figure 3. A tank. Palworld modernizes tanks by attaching pieces of them to cute collectible monsters. (8)
3. Litigation
Ok, let’s address the Phanpy in the room, (9). From the right angle, and with a bit of squinting, Pals might look a little bit like Pokémon. Even though Mickey Mouse recently hit the public domain, Squirtle, Charmander, and the rest of the gang are under lock and key in the Pokémon Company Vault for licensing purposes. Now, I’m not saying that Pals are not their own unique creatures who wish to be seen and understood on their own terms, but I bet if you asked a grandparent to get you a copy of Palworld from Walmart based on one of these furry and feathered friends, there’s a solid chance you’ll be playing a copy of Pokémon Sword and Shield by the end of the day. Pokémon is co-owned by Nintendo, a company that is often extremely protective of its intellectual property, and there’s a non-zero possibility that we get some spicy courtroom drama out of our Pals when Miyamoto finds out what’s been brewing down the street.
4. Simulacra
In 2013, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame exclaimed “Now look what you’ve gone and done; well, that doesn’t sound like fun; See, I’m not the only one; a copy of a copy of a…”. Sometime before that, in Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrilliard argued that we are living in a world of symbols that are effectively copies with no original. The world is no longer real but hyperreal, such that our experience is “...no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes,” (10). We are in the era of the copy. We’ve come a long way from blurry Xeroxes of our own butts on the company copier, because now even our original butts aren’t real. Well, Pikachu’s butt isn’t at least, and Palworld is the perfect emblem of our present hyperreality, where the design of Pals refer directly to the creatures of its antecedent franchise and forego the illusion that these are inspired by anything real… aside from the guns of course. Where I disagree with Mr. Reznor however, is that this kind of does sound like fun. At least fun to watch if not to play, because…
5. Everyone Loves a Trainwreck
Figure 4. The train wreck at Montparnasse, 1895. A visual approximation of Palworld’s potential future. (11)
There is a solid chance that this game isn’t very good. That’s ok. What defines our current era more than an absolute trainwreck. Many of us are living through an absolute disaster, and given what Palworld has slapped together it is primed to join us as strewn together remnants of much stronger stuff that somehow manage to persist in spite of our many, many flaws. But…
6. It Might Actually be Good?
Call me a dreamer, but how could this really go wrong? If it fails it will be a spectacular disaster, and we can all chill like Kant in the sublime embrace of the game’s reputation melting in the magma flow of negative games discourse. We can grab some popcorn and watch the (Pal)world end before it even gets started. But if it’s like, actually fun, what’s better than a surprise? Sure, Palworld at its best might not be a game with a lot to say, but how many games are these days. The future is here, and the future might be Palworld. Even though it’s new, we’ve all been here before, and I feel like we’re probably going to be here again before too long.
Concluding Remarks Before the End of the (Gaming) World.
In summary, Palworld is poised to usher in a new era of digital gaming, and even though it may look the same as the previous era of digital gaming, Palworld is the most the same, and that makes it exceptional by some kind of logic. It is a vortex of genres, a shameless appropriation of IP, a flurry of character-based collection, cartoonish violence, and homesteading. The beams have crossed, convergence has occurred, and I for one am ready for Fake-a-chu to descend from the clouds and ferry me home, where my bazookas live.
References
1. Pocket Pair, Inc, 2024.
2. Francis Fukuyama. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992.
3. Palworld Screenshot, Xbox Promotional Material. https://img.xboxachievements.com/images/monthly_2024_01/screenshots/9265/palworld_ss6_36050a88-e2f0-4baa-8c82-dfcb92b50b76.jpg.
4. Palworld Screenshot, Xbox Promotional Material. https://img.xboxachievements.com/images/monthly_2024_01/screenshots/9265/palworld_ss1_4f1168ab-fe9d-4a81-99e5-942c83e2ace5.jpg.
5. Xiao Liang, Lorenzo Scarazzato, Dr Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, Dr Nan Tian, Dr Diego Lopes da Silva, Yeoun Choi and Eero Kristjan Sild (2023). “The SIPRI Top 100 Arms-Producing and Military Services Companies, 2022.” SIPRI Fact Sheet, December 2023.
6. Activision.
7. Electronic Arts.
8. Wikimedia Commons Image, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/12/T-34-85_g%C3%B3ra_RB.jpg/640px-T-34-85_g%C3%B3ra_RB.jpg.
9. Phanpy is a Pokémon that looks like an elephant. :).
10. Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994, 2.
11. Wikimedia Commons Image, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895.jpg/640px-Train_wreck_at_Montparnasse_1895.jpg.
